FAMU STUDENT'S KILLER DENIED DEATH WISH

The man who confessed to killing Carmela Fuce, a Florida A & M University student from Fort Lauderdale, said he wanted to die for his 1991 crime. A jury and judge complied with his request.

On Thursday, however, the Florida Supreme Court voted 4-3 to spare the life of Richard Tony Robertson, 25. Robertson's sentence was reduced to life, which requires a minimum of 25 years behind bars.

The court acknowledged that Fuce _ who had been an honor student, track star, cheerleader and homecoming queen at Nova High School in Davie _ was the victim of a "brutal strangulation-suffocation murder."

But it said the death sentence for Robertson, who was 19 at the time of the murder, was "disproportionate under the circumstances present here."

Cited as factors offsetting the violence of Robertson's crime were his age at the time, his "abused and deprived childhood," a long history of mental illness that included schizophrenia, his borderline intelligence and his impairment at the time of the killing due to alcohol and drug use.

Fuce's father, Frank, a retired Broward County schoolteacher, was upset by the decision. He sat through the 1993 trial with Fuce's mother, Jenell, and Fuce's two older sisters, Frances and Vada. All three are Broward teachers.

"As a reasonable human being, I recognize that vengeance taken against a murderer does not restore the loss that loved ones will have experienced," he said on Thursday. "But if the death penalty is to be valid and utilized in our society, it must be used and enforced without loopholes coming into play after the fact of a trial."

The three dissenting Supreme Court justices said a full hearing on Robertson's mental competency should have been conducted before the trial.

They noted that Robertson had been institutionalized several times for schizophrenia and that his pre-trial behavior was bizarre, such as at a hearing in which he said he was the devil's catcher.

Robertson said he was high on beer, hard liquor, LSD, marijuana, PCP and possibly medications for his mental illness when he bound and killed Fuce at an apartment complex near well-traveled Tennessee Street and Florida State University.

At his trial, Robertson begged, "Take me. Just like I took Carmela. Because I can't take it no more. It's driving me crazy. If you don't give me the death penalty, someone else might end up dead."

Fuce's body was found on Labor Day 1991. She was blindfolded, and her bra had been stuffed in her mouth with what the medical examiner described as brute force. An electrical cord was around her neck. Her hands were bound with cloth and another electrical cord. Bleach had been poured on her.

The walls of Fuce's bedroom were scrawled with a misspelling of Satan and racial and sexual epithets. The handwriting matched Robertson's.

Fuce had expected to live on campus her sophomore year, but a dormitory room promised by FAMU was not available. The off-campus apartment, adjacent to a crime-ridden area, was a last-minute choice from a list passed out by FAMU.

The Fuce family has a lawsuit pending against the school for recommending the apartments. Witnesses said Robertson had been hanging around the complex.

Only Justice Charles Wells said the death penalty was merited for Robertson, but he otherwise sided with the majority opinion, which also revoked Robertson's convictions for burglary and theft of Fuce's car.

"The family has been anguished," Frank Fuce said. "At this point, after agonizing over the loss of my daughter and having to go through the trial, I have begun to settle reliance on the guidance, the grace of the Almighty to help me get along."

A college scholarship in Carmela Fuce's memory has been established at Nova High School.